Charities have reported difficulties paying staff due to an ongoing outage to CAF Bank’s online portal.
The organisation’s online banking service has been down since Friday due to an issue with third-party software, preventing some charities from accessing payroll.
Since then, some of CAF Bank’s 14,000 charity customers have reported being cut off from accessing their funds and having to wait several hours to access support over the phone, despite the organisation making extra teams available.
Dawn Haston, Herefordshire Mind finance officer, said that some staff have not received payments despite getting payroll put onto CAF Bank last Thursday.
“We have managed to get some cash from the cashpoint to tide them over but they have bills to pay and this is totally unacceptable,” she told Civil Society.
“Telling people to phone when they don’t have sufficient staff to answer is ridiculous.”
Lewis Spurgin, East Suffolk Trust chief executive, told Civil Society today that his environmental grant-giving charity has been locked out.
“There’s no estimated resolution date, there’s no viable contingency,” he said. “I think it’s pretty scandalous really that you can just shut access to a bank.”
Spurgin added that East Suffolk Trust would consider changing providers, having only joined in October last year.
“It has been quite surprising as a new customer to see a bank operate that way,” he said. “The communication side in particular has been poor.”
CAF Bank, a subsidiary of the Charities Aid Foundation, has updated its social media followers throughout the outage and apologised for the disruption.
Its chief executive Alison Taylor today told Civil Society that the “core bank” was unaffected, but access to the online service would be unavailable “until further notice” as the issue with the third-party provider is addressed.
“We are acutely aware of the impact this has on our customers and want this to be fixed as soon as possible,” Taylor said.
“I am very sorry for the disruption and understand the frustration this can cause for our customers.
“We are still able to support on the phone but there are much higher call volumes than usual.
“While we have extra teams available, we need to prioritise time-sensitive payments such as payroll.”
Charities bemoan ‘communications failure’
CAF Bank customers previously experienced disruption when the organisation updated its online system in June last year.
Local infrastructure organisation Support Staffordshire was paid £750 in compensation by CAF Bank after going to an ombudsman over the previous disruption.
On the current outage, chief finance officer Jayne Ison told Civil Society her charity received notice of the problems last Friday, which remain unresolved four days later.
“It’s very concerning when we cannot log in or get to our funds – if we had payroll last Friday through CAF’s system it would have been a disaster,” she said.
Ison said she opened an account outside of CAF Bank after her charity’s previous problems, which allowed payroll to go through for her 120 staff.
Oliver Sheahan, centre manager of Boxmoor and Warners End Neighbourhood Association, said he similarly was only able to pay staff through a separate bank provider.
He said his community centre and London pre-school remains blocked from accessing its accounts.
Sheahan criticised CAF Bank’s communication over the outage, saying he spent more than two hours on hold trying to access support.
“My own experience mirrors this total communications failure,” he said. “CAF Bank’s official advice was for customers with urgent payrolls to contact them by telephone.
“Yet, their fallback phone system is completely overwhelmed and broken.”
